Most books don’t earn back their advances, but some go deeper into the tank than others. Boris Kachka listed three notorious flops in a recent survey of the state of the publishing industry for New York: Vikram Chandra’s Sacred Games (HarperCollins, 2007), Charlies Frazier’s Thirteen Moons (Random House, 2008) and James Frey’s Bright Shiny Morning (HarperCollins. Kachka suggests why these novels bombed atnymag.com/news/media/50279/index7.html.

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You have wonder what the publisher was thinking. This was a textbook case of an overrated first novel (“Cold Mountain”) that set up for a giantic sophomore slump … except that slump seems way too mild a word for it, doesn’t it?

What an expensive gamble! I could maybe see taking a chance with Thirteen Moons because Cold Mountain was a word-of-mouth hit, and the publishers may have thought that the audience would be built-in. Of course, it was 10 years ago that people read Cold Mountain. Taking a chance on James Frey I can’t see at all. These authors aren’t contractually obligated to give back their advances to their publishers, are they? For their sakes, I hope not!